Premonitions Read Online Free PDF

by accident, or by being careless, and it wasn’t his style to extend himself much. But, still—two million dollars? For
Ames
? That was dumb. “Maybe we can leave her out of this,” he suggested. “Me and a few of the boys can—”
    “No.” Sobell put the glass on the bar with a dry, precise click. “For every job, there is an appropriate tool. Karyn Ames and her crew have a few rather specialized skills. And, frankly, you have a different role to play in this absurd comedy.”
    Gresser nodded. He’d learned long ago that many of his questions would be answered in time, as long as he was patient.
    Sobell pulled his jacket off the nearest barstool and put it on. “I assume the car is waiting?”
    * * *
    Sobell paused before the warehouse door, a dingy little side door next to the big overheads, and stepped aside. Gresser obligingly turned the knob and opened the door for him. He walked into the dimly lit space and stepped through the heavy, hunched shadows cast by obscure machinery rusting in the dark. Blue-white fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed, spitting feeble illumination into the vast volume. Gresser shut the door with a clang and quickly caught up.
    “All has been quiet here, I assume?” Sobell asked.
    “Yes, sir.”
    Sobell nodded. He wasn’t looking forward to this next piece of work at all, but he couldn’t put it off much longer. Any day now, Mendelsohn’s pet may very well escape and vanish beyond Sobell’s reach, or—rather more likely, he thought—escape, kill every living thing in Mendelsohn’s home and a hundred-yard radius, and then vanish beyond his reach. Ames and company needed to cooperate, and Sobell needed to get his preparation under way, which meant taking care of the nasty business at hand. He would have much preferred to deal with Mendelsohn’s creature without having to mess with the entity he was on his way to meet, but it simply wouldn’t do to show up without payment, and he couldn’t think of a better way to get it. Had, in fact, worked a small miracle or two to arrange this . . . meeting.
    He surveyed the darkness, unable to clear the self-satisfied smile from his lips. “Lead on, Mr. Gresser.”
    Gresser edged around him and took a sharp right at the next clear spot between shelves of inscrutable equipment. Sobell stepped over some kind of winch and narrowly avoided twisting his ankle on something that looked like a giant ball bearing—not that he’d know a ball bearing from a socket wrench, if it came down to it. His talents had always lain in other areas.
    “Charming place,” he said. “Union shop?”
    Gresser grunted a short laugh. “Through here.” Theheavy overhanging shelf of his brow wrinkled in a question. “Ready?”
    “Of course.”
    Gresser pushed open a door covered in flaking paint, a green so dark it was nearly black in the fluorescents. Soft silver light poured from the room.
    Sobell squinted. “Bit shiny, eh?” Gresser had already stepped aside, outside the room. His face was an expressionless mask, though Sobell could see the tight bunching of muscles at his jaw. He didn’t like this one bit. Probably time to throw him a bonus, then. Good help, and all that.
    Sobell brushed past his discomfited lieutenant and went through the doorway. The room beyond, perhaps once a small storage room, was now quite plainly a cell. It had been emptied by some of Gresser’s gorillas, but the thousands of glyphs and symbols that lined the walls had been drawn on the panels by Sobell himself before they were installed. It was not the kind of work one left up to lackeys.
    In the corner of the room stood the source of the silver light. Man-sized and roughly man-shaped, it still wasn’t something you could call a proper human being. It was more like a department store mannequin of unearthly beauty, a form that suggested a thousand shapes rather than actually taking one itself. It didn’t even have eyes or a mouth that Sobell could see, merely